As Canada struggles to deal with the U.S. president, it should ask itself this: What is Donald Trump’s superpower?
If nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging, what does an endless series of potential hangings do to one’s cranium?
This is the question Canada must contemplate as it braces for more Donald Trump. We may have received a 30-day reprieve on tariffs, but Trump will be back to beggar his neighbour. And every day he is in power, he inspires another generation of “leaders” imbued with the philosophy of “might makes right.”
For Canada to answer the question, it must drop the delusion that the traditional rules of statecraft apply, or at least apply in the way we’re used to. More importantly, Canadians must recognize how deeply our information economy has changed, and why our rules of accountability no longer apply there, either. We are now through the looking glass, with most gatekeepers in the corridors of Western power not fully realizing how everything has changed.
Another way to frame the problem is to ask: “What is Trump’s superpower?” The answer: a complete lack of shame. Trump does not care what he says or what reaction it provokes. He will punch his nation’s best friend in the face and try to steal our lunch money, lie about doing it when caught in the act, then do it again.
And what allows Trump to operate without shame? An information economy with no shame, either — one that actively rewards people for their shamelessness. Yes, this is the hell wrought by the ad-based algorithmic social media of the so-called “attention economy” where “time on platform” matters more than truth or accuracy. It is the world where someone as mercurial as Elon Musk gets to decide what is fact and what is fiction, not through any sort of editorial procedures, but through whim.
The West used to have systems in place to resist such people. The main bulwark of that system was a free and independent press and its scrutiny function. We have spent the past 20 years (inadvertently) dismantling that system. In the recent past, you couldn’t lie and expect to get to first base in politics. Now, lying is the key to hitting a home run.
Trump first mused about running for the presidency in the late 1980s. If you read the coverage of the time, much of Trump’s message was the same: the United States was getting ripped off and it was time somebody did something about it. His target was then (mostly) Japan, the then-economic upstarts “stealing” American jobs and prosperity. It’s not Trump that’s different; it’s the universe around him.
The moral for our story is Trump’s 1980s bluster fell apart the first moment it was challenged by someone working for a serious news outfit. The same was true when he tried to run for the presidency in 2000. Moreover, he had no way to easily co-opt what was then a vibrant Republican Party, with its hierarchies and power blocs. It took hard work to be a serious contender and Trump doesn’t do hard work. The system screened him out.
All this changed in the 2010s when the information economy suddenly gifted Trump a megaphone he could use to get around the hard work of organizing. Twitter gave Trump a playground of shamelessness where fringe topics like “birtherism” were fuel for a political career, rather than a career-killer.
If Canada wants to inoculate itself from Trump, it should club together at the G7 and G20 and start asking why democracies like ours allow the (most American) behemoths of the attention economy to operate in the way they do. Why is “free” an acceptable business model when the cost to society is so great? Why do the authoritarians of the world keep these platforms out or use them as weapons (i.e. TikTok), while we allow ourselves to become addicted to them?
If we want to limit Trump, we need to start by draining the swamp that is the attention economy. Because in the current system Trump — or someone equally shameless — wins every time.
Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
